Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Host Tommy Geoco discovers what fuels the internet's most interesting designers and builders.
S1 0:00
I'm about to show you a founder who every investor said was building
S1 0:04
the stupidest idea they'd ever heard.
S1 0:07
This is what they told him. No one believed in it.
S1 0:09
They're like, this is dumb. This is the worst idea ever.
S2 0:12
This is so stupid. How are you gonna make money?
S2 0:14
I just remember, like, feeling
S2 0:15
so like the wind just was taken out of my sails.
S2 0:18
What they're really. Saying is, like, I don't believe in you.
S1 0:20
I don't think you could do this.
S1 0:21
I don't think you can build this. This shouldn't exist.
S1 0:24
They laughed at him, literally laughed.
S1 0:26
But here's what they didn't know that increasing the amount freelancers
S1 0:29
earn would instantly make contra a creator's home.
S1 0:33
Over the next 30 minutes, you're going to learn why.
S1 0:34
Betting against the obvious might be the smartest thing you ever do,
S1 0:38
and why I'm doing the same thing right now.
S1 0:41
Let me crack into that, because that's really interesting.
S2 0:44
I'm curious what your take on that is.
S1 0:47
Ben Huffman isn't supposed to be here.
S1 0:49
No degree, no connections, no Silicon Valley pedigree like me.
S1 0:53
We were just two kids who found our future on the early internet.
S1 0:56
This is where we both started.
S1 0:57
I built my first. Computer when I was 13 from components and even younger
S2 1:01
we had a family computer, but it was in my parents room. I couldn't really use it.
S2 1:04
I was like, oh man, I really want this PC.
S2 1:06
So I'd save up money, like doing chores.
S2 1:08
I think it might have been like 2 or $300 for all the components
S2 1:11
to basically build my first computer, I built it.
S2 1:13
I immediately fell in love with the internet, and I'm from rural South Carolina.
S2 1:17
There's not a lot to do there.
S2 1:18
It's beautiful, but not a lot going on for
S2 1:21
someone who's young, has a lot of ideas, a lot of energy.
S2 1:24
And when I was 19, about to turn 20,
S2 1:27
I dropped out of school and moved up to New York.
S2 1:30
I was a college dropout. So there's a lot of imposter syndrome there.
S2 1:33
A lot of the people I would interact with, they were all working
S2 1:36
at, like cool tech companies or like Facebook or whatever.
S2 1:40
And I just remember thinking like, wow, I could never do that.
S2 1:42
I don't have a degree, no one to hire me.
S2 1:45
There's nothing on my resume.
S2 1:46
I'm just good with computers.
S1 1:48
I remember my first website, 800 pixels wide borders,
S1 1:51
that I spliced out of a cracked version of Photoshop, cringe
S1 1:55
poetry, and blog entries.
S1 1:57
At 13, I didn't know what I was doing and I loved it.
S1 2:00
Then something changed.
S1 2:02
There was a moment that rewired everything.
S2 2:04
I remember when I got my first freelance project.
S2 2:08
Everything changed. Like for the first time,
S2 2:10
I felt like someone valued my opinion.
S2 2:12
Someone recognized my skills and were like, whoa, like, you can actually help me.
S2 2:16
And that was so validating because, you know,
S2 2:19
having that moment to say, like, hey, I'm the expert, I can help.
S2 2:22
I have authority here. That was big.
S1 2:24
You took me back to when I first started in the field.
S1 2:27
And I think I think it was Elance.
S1 2:29
I left the military and I was just sprinting.
S1 2:32
I had already had four children at that point,
S1 2:34
and I was sprinting to upskill myself
S1 2:37
and be valuable enough to charge rates.
S1 2:39
I didn't know how to sell, and it was Elance,
S1 2:41
and I was like, just picking at the lowest quality jobs
S1 2:44
I could get for $500 for like a WordPress website.
S1 2:48
And it was it was like, I have to take them off platform immediately,
S1 2:51
and it just felt very cold and calculated.
S1 2:54
That first client that believes in you
S1 2:56
feels like oxygen to somebody who's drowning,
S1 2:59
but the platforms at the time
S1 3:01
felt like they were bleeding us dry.
S2 3:03
Like if you're using a platform that has commission fees,
S2 3:06
it already like, puts us at odds with each other.
S2 3:08
The more you pay me, the more the platform earns.
S2 3:12
And so you're kind of like as a platform trying to, like,
S2 3:14
make me pay more.
S2 3:15
Like, that's kind of weird.
S2 3:16
And then for me, I'm like trying to get you off
S2 3:18
this platform as fast as possible.
S2 3:20
So I'm acting sketchy. I'm like, hey, Tommy, please.
S2 3:22
Like, I don't want to pay this 20%.
S2 3:24
Like, can we just get off? I need to like, pay my bills and shit.
S2 3:27
And so, like, that creates this weird kind of divide
S2 3:30
that kind of takes away the humanity of the relationship. Right.
S2 3:32
And so I think more people are going to be like me
S2 3:36
where they're young, they're skilled, they're gonna need to enter the workforce,
S2 3:39
they're going to need to get experience,
S2 3:41
and they need to come into an ecosystem that actually has a lot of incentives
S2 3:45
with the outcome that they're trying to achieve. They're trying to get better.
S2 3:47
They're trying to prove themselves. They're trying to get their footing. But let's back up.
S1 3:51
Where did this all begin?
S2 3:52
There was like Newegg.
S2 3:53
There was all these other like, sites
S2 3:55
where you could, like, nerd out about like graphics cards or motherboards,
S2 3:59
and there's tons of forums that kind of supported those.
S2 4:01
I loved torrent sites where I could basically crack
S2 4:05
the latest version or download the latest keygen
S2 4:07
for whatever software I wanted to use.
S2 4:09
I loved Themeforest. Funny enough.
S2 4:11
I thought Themeforest was amazing to get get started
S2 4:14
with like a WordPress template or a bootstrap template or whatever.
S2 4:16
Like you could buy code, you could buy video graphics, buy like After Effects templates.
S2 4:21
I thought that was the coolest thing.
S2 4:24
A lot of a lot of talking.
S2 4:26
I'm sure a lot of people got their their start that way too.
S1 4:29
These weren't just websites, there were communities and real ones.
S1 4:32
But in 2019, Ben had an idea so simple it was radical.
S1 4:36
What if freelancers kept 100% of what they made?
S2 4:41
So in the beginning, when we were starting contra, I had that feeling.
S2 4:45
I was like, wow, this is the greatest idea ever.
S2 4:47
Like, of course, like no one wants to pay commission fees.
S2 4:50
Of course, the creative industry is going to get behind this.
S2 4:53
Of course, it's so easy to build payments
S2 4:55
and something that people actually want to use.
S2 4:57
And all of these things like this is
S2 4:59
this is a no brainer, Commissioner. Free. This is obvious.
S2 5:01
I remember when we first went out to raise money for contra.
S2 5:05
Everyone was like, this is the worst idea ever.
S2 5:07
They're like, this is so stupid.
S2 5:09
They're like, how are you gonna make money?
S2 5:11
Why would people want to join a website?
S2 5:14
Everyone just wants like, the best people just have their own portfolio
S2 5:17
and they just want to get leads from referrals.
S2 5:19
And then the worst people are going to be on like,
S2 5:21
Fiver and Upwork, and they don't care about paying commission fees.
S2 5:24
And I was like, I was like, look, that's
S2 5:25
probably not what the future is going to be.
S2 5:27
There's going to be all these interconnected systems.
S2 5:28
Now, you see, X is this amazing ecosystem
S2 5:31
for creatives and designers that didn't really exist back then.
S2 5:34
And I just remember, like, feeling
S2 5:35
so like the wind just was taken out of my sails
S2 5:37
like no one believed in it. They're like, this is dope.
S2 5:40
And it was what they were really saying is like, I don't believe in you.
S2 5:43
I don't think you could do this, and I don't think you can build this.
S2 5:46
And this didn't exist.
S2 5:48
And that was kind of like my first experience,
S2 5:51
like trying to get other people to believe in contra.
S2 5:54
And because it's a commission free model,
S2 5:56
like, we didn't really have
S2 5:57
a lot of ways to make money in the early days, so we couldn't
S2 5:60
really just bootstrap the revenue.
S2 6:02
So I had to just plow all my savings into it and just keep going.
S2 6:05
But like, that was one of the first examples of the pain cave.
S2 6:08
When you have all this excitement and you're like, wow,
S2 6:10
you're like psyching yourself up every day and then the world just doesn't,
S2 6:14
you know, agree.
S1 6:16
I know this feeling intimately.
S1 6:18
I feel like I've lived a lot of my life in the pain cave,
S1 6:21
a lot of ideas that unfortunately didn't make it out of the pain cave.
S1 6:26
How do you not take it personal
S1 6:28
when someone doesn't see your vision
S1 6:30
and you're in that place and it's so painful?
S1 6:34
I think. Of course you take it personally, right?
S2 6:36
Like it's very personal.
S2 6:38
You put your blood, sweat and tears into something
S2 6:41
and you put yourself out there saying like,
S2 6:44
hey, what do you think about this?
S2 6:45
And you get rejected
S2 6:48
and it hurts and it's very personal.
S2 6:50
And like, inside you're like, ah,
S2 6:52
like, I'm going to show this person, like,
S2 6:53
I'm never going to let this person invest.
S2 6:55
I'm never going to let this person, you know, even like it.
S2 6:58
Just all the thoughts like swirling your in your head. Right.
S2 7:01
When you take it personally, there's no way not to.
S2 7:03
And I think over time we realize that all the good ideas, they're not obvious?
S2 7:07
Anything that's good that's worth doing
S2 7:10
is probably not that obvious to a ton of people.
S2 7:12
And if it was, then it's probably not the best idea,
S2 7:14
because there'd be tons of competition
S2 7:16
and it'd be super saturated and everyone would be trying to do it.
S2 7:18
I just need to keep going and see if I can prove them wrong.
S2 7:21
And so I don't know.
S2 7:22
I've never found a good way
S2 7:24
to not get emotional and take it personally.
S2 7:26
I'm curious, like what your take on
S2 7:28
that is, because I could probably use some advice there.
S1 7:30
I can't give you good advice because I take it personal.
S1 7:32
Every single time. I need to tell you about the moment everything almost ended.
S1 7:36
It's 2015, the first ever Twitch conference.
S1 7:39
We land in San Francisco and I get a phone call.
S1 7:42
It's my wife and she says our only family vehicle,
S1 7:45
the one we use to transport our four kids, needs a new engine.
S1 7:48
I'm in the Marriott hotel lobby crying,
S1 7:51
trying to figure out how I'm going to tell my co-founders
S1 7:54
that I need to go back home to find more client work and ASAP.
S1 7:58
My co-founder said, we're already here.
S1 8:01
Let's make the most of it.
S1 8:02
48 hours later, we have two acquisition offers.
S1 8:06
Four weeks later, we're moving to San Francisco,
S1 8:09
but the first version was kind of confusing and unintuitive.
S1 8:13
People weren't willing to leave their complicated setups
S1 8:16
for our different, but still complicated tool.
S1 8:18
I thought I got it all wrong and I nearly threw in the towel.
S1 8:21
But here's the thing about selling your dream.
S2 8:23
It's crazy because when we were commission free
S2 8:26
and we had no way of monetizing, it actually hurt our credibility.
S2 8:29
People were like, okay, this company's not going to survive.
S2 8:32
Like, why am I going to put any time into this?
S2 8:34
Like, you're not charging anything.
S2 8:35
It's free. Like, what's going to happen? I made the same bet.
S1 8:38
I refused to charge creators,
S1 8:40
but then I ran out of money and I had to sell.
S1 8:43
And that decision still haunts me.
S1 8:45
I spent years trying to build something to help creators make money.
S1 8:48
Then I sold it because I couldn't figure out
S1 8:50
how to make money without feeling like I'd betrayed them.
S1 8:53
How do you build something sustainable
S1 8:55
without losing your love for the game?
S2 8:57
But now we have Culture Pro.
S2 8:59
We have partner network subscriptions, we have an ad network,
S2 9:02
we have contract fees for clients,
S2 9:05
we have subscriptions for companies who are hiring.
S2 9:07
And we have something Actually, I'm going to leak it to you
S2 9:10
for your for your Friday leaks. That's right.
S1 9:12
UX tools is a newsletter I write for almost 100,000 readers.
S1 9:16
I dig into the latest design tools
S1 9:18
and how some of the best people and teams are creating software.
S1 9:22
Check it out at UX tools, and if you like following stories
S1 9:25
like mine or hearing from people like Ben,
S1 9:28
please subscribe to the designer Tom YouTube channel where I drop
S1 9:31
new episodes of this podcast and videos like it every week.
S1 9:35
Your support right now is huge.
S2 9:37
When you try to monetize with value ads
S2 9:41
versus being a pure middleman versus being value extracting,
S2 9:44
we try to only monetize via value
S2 9:46
additive features or products or whatever it is,
S2 9:49
and so you'll probably see a discount for framer on contract.
S2 9:52
You'll probably see a discount for a design school.
S2 9:55
Or you might see a discount for like your favorite animation tool.
S2 9:58
And in a lot of ways, I'm building contour for the younger version of me.
S2 10:02
And I see these people all the time.
S2 10:04
I remember I saw this one tweet from one of our users named Luca.
S2 10:07
He was like, hey, I just got my $50,000 dollars earnings badge on contra.
S2 10:11
Hopefully I'll hit 100 K before I turn 21
S2 10:14
and I'm like, Holy shit,
S2 10:15
that's amazing. It's working right?
S2 10:17
And so Luca can now find his way in the world
S2 10:21
in a way that I wish I could have when I was his age.
S1 10:23
After the acquisition, after corporate life,
S1 10:26
I was laid off and I did the only thing I could think of.
S1 10:29
I started a slide group and invited for my friends not to farm likes
S1 10:32
and not to sell something, but to be able to wake up
S1 10:35
and have people to work alongside of.
S1 10:38
This community gave me clients.
S1 10:40
It gave me Sally and Femke.
S1 10:43
It gave me config events with Jesse and Sorin.
S1 10:46
It gave me a place to be human when everything else felt impossible.
S1 10:49
The reality I'm learning is that community
S1 10:51
isn't just something you find, it's something you build.
S2 10:54
That's how contra started.
S2 10:55
We had a slack community
S2 10:58
for independent creatives.
S2 11:00
You had like 10,000 people in there at peak.
S2 11:02
Yeah, it's really interesting to see kind of
S2 11:05
some of our beta users
S2 11:07
already develop friendships, meet up in real life.
S2 11:10
Start podcast together.
S2 11:12
Start creating content together.
S2 11:14
Teaching each other like framer tricks.
S2 11:16
Teaching each other like content tricks.
S1 11:19
It seems like we've never had more communities spinning up for,
S1 11:23
you know, individual creators and companies,
S1 11:27
but everything seems so.
S1 11:29
It has to be a marketing funnel.
S1 11:30
It's fabricated.
S1 11:32
Like it doesn't seem authentic, like those
S1 11:35
like the a form on like Tom's Hardware way back in the day,
S1 11:39
or even like the forms on those torrent websites.
S1 11:42
There was real relationship building happening,
S1 11:45
and it seems like that's hard to come by these days,
S1 11:48
but it shouldn't be because we're right in front of each other.
S2 11:51
How do you not create an echo chamber?
S2 11:52
Right? With these like algorithms,
S2 11:54
how do you not just give someone more of what they like?
S2 11:56
How do they even discover something new and develop new taste? Right.
S2 11:59
Even seeing this with Spotify, like they have, like
S2 12:01
there's like these magic recommenders, right?
S2 12:04
Like, if you have a playlist, you can, like turn on the AI playlist creator
S2 12:08
and it'll just find you music
S2 12:09
that's complementary to the stuff security lake, but does not create an echo chamber.
S2 12:13
Are you actually going to be able to discover something new?
S2 12:15
I don't know, but that's the general trend of the internet today.
S2 12:17
And so I don't know what the the answer is,
S2 12:19
but it's a hard problem. And if someone solves it.
S1 12:21
They'll get out of the pain. Cave.
S2 12:22
Yeah. Want to know what's possible?
S1 12:24
Now? Let me tell you about a 19 year old kid named Mark.
S2 12:27
There's just one contra user who operates his agency.
S2 12:31
I actually just met him in San Francisco. His name is Mark.
S2 12:33
You probably have seen him on Twitter, but he's like 19 from Kazakhstan.
S2 12:38
He's pulling in like 50 K a month.
S2 12:40
I'm not even joking. This is all through X though.
S2 12:41
He's just like has this like formula where he's he's like, he's 19 years old.
S2 12:45
He got his visa to the US because of stripe sessions.
S2 12:48
So he basically stripe wrote him recommendations letter
S2 12:51
and then he was able to get his visa.
S2 12:53
And so like now he's in the US.
S2 12:55
When you meet someone who's 19
S2 12:56
you're probably like, I don't know, can you actually do good work?
S2 12:58
He basically made a free
S2 13:00
like kind of jitter animation
S2 13:02
for the bolt hackathon.
S2 13:04
And then the bolt team reached out to him
S2 13:07
saying like, well, he just posted it on Twitter. He just posted on X.
S2 13:11
He's like, killer work using this cool new tool for free for this company.
S2 13:14
The company reaches out to him, pays him for it, uses it,
S2 13:18
and now he has all these people hitting him up in the DMs
S2 13:21
to basically create something similar.
S2 13:23
So he was infinitely curious.
S2 13:25
He saw that like, oh wow, Bolt's just like fast growing company.
S2 13:28
I'm gonna maybe ride that wave jitter.
S2 13:30
Amazing tool. So he learned how to use jitter.
S2 13:32
He's already a good designer, right?
S2 13:33
He made the animation for free posted out there.
S2 13:36
It was sick, got noticed, and now he has tons of leads. This isn't luck.
S1 13:40
This is what happens when platforms actually align with creators.
S2 13:44
I was talking to one of our most successful users and he's like 25.
S2 13:48
He is basically saying that he learned skills by looking at contrast,
S2 13:52
seeing who's actually earning with which tools,
S2 13:54
and then learning that tool and becoming proficient.
S2 13:57
But now, like, the tools are so good.
S2 13:59
Like if you're creative and you have good ideas,
S2 14:01
like you can learn a tool and create crazy things.
S2 14:04
Like, I wish I was coming up in this in this ecosystem.
S2 14:07
It's so it's like the stuff you could do today is nuts.
S2 14:10
And now Midjourney just launched video.
S2 14:11
It's like, it's the best time ever to be a creative.
S2 14:14
It's just like some people pay attention to the noise.
S2 14:17
Some people just heads down and just like, make it happen.
S1 14:20
There's a shift happening in creative work,
S1 14:22
and Ben calls it the Hollywood model for everyone.
S2 14:25
The means of production are now available to all,
S2 14:28
and the people with the best ideas can win.
S2 14:30
So you have all of these amazing ideas
S2 14:32
and you're able to pull in these amazing collaborators.
S2 14:35
That's like the Hollywood model, right?
S2 14:36
I guess you bring together a team for a very specific outcome, right?
S2 14:39
Whether it's the UX tool survey or the yearbook project,
S2 14:42
that was the OG Hollywood model where like you get
S2 14:45
a set of like production staff
S2 14:47
and the camera crew and the director and the actors,
S2 14:50
and you all work on these different projects
S2 14:52
for these different periods of time, and then you move on.
S2 14:54
But you always work together again, and you build trust that way.
S2 14:57
You know, the way that you're operating today.
S2 14:59
Building this new like media company is the same way
S2 15:01
that I think everyone's going to operate in the future.
S2 15:04
Like you're just ahead of the curve, and culture is just trying to keep up
S2 15:07
with what all the best creatives have always been doing.
S1 15:10
Which brings me to right now.
S1 15:12
This time I'm doing it different.
S1 15:14
I'm building internet and lawyers sort of media and product studio.
S1 15:18
Same mission, hopefully new wisdom,
S1 15:21
tens of thousands of my own dollars,
S1 15:23
a team of incredible people and media that I think tech
S1 15:26
and design need and software that I want to build for me,
S1 15:30
not optimized for algorithms, not built as a funnel, but built for meaning,
S1 15:35
then went from being a college dropout to building the future of work
S1 15:39
not despite being an outsider, but because of it.
S1 15:42
The pain cave isn't where the dreams go to die,
S1 15:44
it's where they go to transform.
S1 15:45
If you're hearing this feeling like an outsider burning money
S1 15:49
on a dream that everyone else thinks is stupid, you're not alone.
S1 15:53
We're all in that pain cave and the only way out is through.
S1 15:57
Big bets are terrifying.
S1 15:58
Ben is betting on community and the new way of creative work.
S1 16:02
I'm betting on media and trying to make creative technology
S1 16:05
fun and approachable again.
S1 16:07
Follow me as I learn how to do it
S1 16:09
from some of the best in the business. See you next time!